Thursday, April 4, 2013

BB&T said Thursday that it again has become the victim of cyber attacks, which plagued the Winston-Salem-based bank's website this week and last month.

The BB&T assault comes as some of the nation's biggest banks continue to report such attacks. Wells Fargo, for example, said intermittent problems with its website last week were caused by abnormally high traffic volumes that appeared to be the result of a cyber attack.

In so-called denial-of-service, or distributed-denial-of-service, attacks, which have become a popular form of cyber strike against big banks, Web servers are flooded with requests, which cause banks' websites to run sluggishly or temporarily go down.

Brian Davis, a BB&T spokesman, said Thursday that the bank has been the victim of off-and-on denial-of-service attacks since September.

During an attack, most visitors to BB&T's website will experience intermittent outages, he said, adding that "some people might (see) slowness. Some people might see an error message.”

On Thursday morning, an Observer reporter could not access BB&T's site. Instead, the following message appeared:

"At this time, we are experiencing intermittent outages on BBT.com. This may prevent access to the site or use of our online products and services."

Davis, though, said the bank's technical staff reported that the site was working normally Thursday morning.

BankInfoSecurity reported last year that BB&T had been hit by a cyber attack.